Het Rotterdam Project & The essentiel graphics editor

One of the latest projects I’ve been working on. I designed the logo and made the animation, the edit was already done for me. The director Martijn Heijne told me he needed quite a few different titles in the show (dates, locations, names etc) plus that he worked in Adobe Premiere.
That reminded me that I should look into that #Essentielgraphics by #Adobe workflow. Let me tell you how I got it to work.

It basically skips the rendering from #AdobeAfterEffects. Instead you create a file called a mogrt (motion graphics template), with it you make a set up and add the properties you want the Premiere user to be able to adjust. Of course this sounds very easy but it did not work. Why? My first problem was that I did not have my Premiere up to date. You need both AE en Pr to be the latest version.

I watched a couple of tutorials but I was confused about which properties I could drag into the essential graphics editor. It has a handy “solo supported properties” button, but this only showed me a few options. So I first designed the title the way I wanted to be. With pretty complex effects (displacement maps and fractal noises) and precomps. Then just made a mogrt (export motion graphics template), pulled it into premiere and checked it. And it worked! I started adding properties to adjust and then checking if it worked in premiere. So I found out that size, is not yet supported but at the IBCI’ve seen demo’s, so in the newest version there should be a lot more that you can let the Premiere user adjust and decide.

Martijn Heijne called me back a few times to ask me if he could just write the full name of the month instead of a digital date, and because I made a dynamic block (see tutorial https://youtu.be/VNNgh0ZVKi0) he can do that right in Premiere, with out me having to re-size and re-render. Easy, flexible and time saver.

Less work, less pay you say? Well I much rather spend extra time designing beautiful things then resize blocks. Of course not every client uses Premiere, so I’ll still be making some old lower thirds.
But I’d love to experiment more with the upcoming versions, to see if adjustment layers, colours, masks etc could also be exportable as a mogrt. That way I could offer designing a leader, that can be customised for every episode. At your service.